


rubatosis

by NerumiH



Category: Vocaloid
Genre: F/M, Hitoshizuku x yama, Incest, Prisoner of Love and Desire, yamashizuku
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-29 06:31:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5118644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NerumiH/pseuds/NerumiH
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If she could be happy, it would be enough to stop him. (If she could be his.)</p><p>-- Prisoner of Love and Desire</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (cross posted from my ffnet where I could hide the fact that I was using rubatosis for way too many fics)
> 
> me: im gonna write one of those pretty, decorative oneshots where everything is in tiny little scenes and the metaphors are all flowery and everything wraps up quickly and beautifully and fffUCK I WROTE ANOTHER 1K SCENE AGAIN
> 
> Somehow I absolutely fell in love with this song. And here we go. Enjoy!

Her heart, he thinks, must be too much for them.

Women and men flit so uselessly amongst each other... A coquettish smile here, a tampering touch there, an argument, a silence, a closing, hearts up in flame or blasted to pieces. They all shatter so readily, but  _she_ , he muses, is the only one so eager to sweep herself back up and pass the hammer to another.

Why is her love too much? So much, in fact, that under the weight of it they collapse. They drown in the heat of it, her blood bubbling from their lips, and she has the audacity to carve their shape out of her own chest and proclaim look, look! I'm broken. These men do love me and let themselves die. And it hurts.

It hurts.

How she drags them under.

How heavy she must be.

**.x.**

_ru-ba-to-sis._

_[noun.]_

_the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat._

**.x. white .x.**

The first time, she is sixteen: elation and a fairy tale spins her around on her toes in the ballroom. A tulip lulls gently in her fingers, brushing her chin, like a delicate white finger exposing her delicate throat. She might just dance herself straight through to heaven.

He asks her why, and she practically weeps, "Brother, I am in love with a man, and he with me!"

Oh.

Congratulations, sister.

This feeling is inscrutable. Uncomfortable. She's making him dizzy, spinning as she is. Is there enough of her to share in love, he wonders? Or is she only just enough? Enough of a girl for men to sink their teeth into...or is she too frail, too rude, too needy, too afraid – they'll rip her up, searching for any way to stretch her a little more and  _make_  her a little  _more_.

She’s a girl filled with nothing but that anvil heart. Congratulations, sister.

**.x.**

Not long before their seventeenth birthday, it comes as a surprise to all. The man whom she'd fallen for (one so eager to trap a small, fluttering girl in a rope, crop her wings, lock her in a pretty wire cage), had not returned from an outing, and was instead found behind a jewelry store, throat slit, blood streaking depravedly up the wall. No clues, no enemies. He was probably there to buy her something; how sad. He was so very kind. Who would do such a thing?

Len is home a few days late from a hunting trip with friends, and is stranded at palace doors, arms empty, no sister running to him, no one smiling. "There's been a tragedy," his mother silkily admits, then yanks him out of his path to his sister's bedroom like snapping a wayward branch on a rosebush. "She needs time alone."

_Like hell she does._

When they were younger, there was no  _time_ _alone_ for the twins. When her toys broke, she used him as a replacement. When the horse they'd promised her when she was older, but she'd never gotten to even touch, had been sold off to someone else, she'd screamed into his chest for hours. Whenever things went wrong in her pathetically melodramatic life, he was her suture. He remembers the feeling of her clinging to him, her own misery pulling her under. That heart, too much even for herself back then. He was there to keep her chin above water.

She’d always wanted  _him_.

Instead, he pretends to tour the garden to lament about the future-brother he'd lost (as if she’d ever be allowed to marry someone as insignificant as _that_ ), but returns to a desolate hall with dry eyes and a single white tulip.

She mumbles his name to let him in. She's lying on her bed, suffering under layers of expensive sheets and doll-like lace. He slowly lowers himself beside her and touches her hair, smoothing it back, clearing her face.

He hasn't seen her cry for years.

It's different, now.

Before, it was an unbridled misery overtaking her pretty face, eyes wide, the blue unable to sparkle in the torrent. A saw of white flashing through them, like the turn of a knife in pinpointed light. Screaming as if the world is roaring up against her, wind blowing back her hair, her entire body nailed to the ground to confront it.

Now she is frail and curled up, a tension running through her not in sound, but in movement that finds its way under his palm. A clueless bird within a decadent panic. Her skin is splotched with pink, hair lank and sticking to her cheeks. Eyes being crammed shut do nothing to hold the tears back. He carefully rubs her temple with his thumb.

He murmurs, "I'm sorry, sister."

Rin hiccups, her shoulders hunching to protect herself in another sob. His gaze catches on how that arches her collar, her skin taut and smooth and white, bleeding with shadow underneath the bone. Her throat is hollow. Skipping upwards as she breathes. Glistening slightly with the tracks of tears. He grazes his fingers over her brow.

Fracturing, she whispers, "I  _loved_  him."

Her hand sneaks up from under the blankets, warm and damp from her heavy breathing, and slips over his. He pauses to focus on the brush of her fingers against his knuckles, knitting between them, so similar in every way, except for the fact that hers are shuddering and his are deadly calm.

He squeezes her hand.

"And I love  _you_ , Rin. All right?"

She isn't looking at him, but he watches her manage a smile.

Is it true, he wonders, that the first horror is always the worst?

**.x.**

She isn't crying anymore. She must have fallen asleep.

She hadn't been up to discussing much, but she did allow him permission to stay.  _I'll feel better if you're here, Len._ They held matching discomfort about conversing, but, he figures, just holding her close says the most.

After slipping into bed on the side away from where she faces, he watches the back of her neck as if it is something to be charmed by. He touches her hairline; her blonde locks are growing so quickly, their curls spinning into waves under their own weight. His hand opens slightly, fingers curving under her tiny, pretty shell of an ear, and something thrilling stammers there.

Her heart. A trill of a pulse, just behind her jaw. She's so warm. So steady. He can't hear his own heart, even when he's terrified. But her – she's right  _here_ next to him, and  _in_  him. A euphony to lull her into sleep, and him, too.

He blows out the light.

**.x.**

Their parents introduce her to a new suitor a few months later.  _That isn't going to work_ , Len seethes. She still weeps for the other boy, doesn't she?

But she accepts this intruder with open arms, smiling lips. Introductions excite her. New men do especially. She's like a vain nouveau-riche examining pearls on her neck – how do the two of us look from this angle? How shall he hold my waist? What does the colour of my lipstick look like on his skin? The difference is that, for Rin,  _everything_  is good enough.

A night afterwards, he reads in the study while she writes flirty letters, and at the book he says in lieu of nothing, "You're a whore, Rin."

She freezes. He imagines her heart skipping a beat. Then she agitatedly stabs her pen into the inkpot, scoffing, "I just want to be happy!"

"You aren't happy alone?"

"What  _idiot_  can be?" She slaps her hand on the table until he looks up at her apathetically. "I like company, is that so wrong? Don't tell me you're  _pleased_  with being alone. Don't you treasure trusting people, having friends?"

He rolls his eyes. " _These_  are not your friends."

"They're people that make me happy, Len. Why do you only care about this when I'm  _not_  miserable?"

He runs his nails down the page, gaze flicking from hers. "Don't  _I_ make you happy?"

"How can you, when you say things like _that_ to me?"

_And yet, you are here. Yet, you love my side almost as much as you love theirs. When they are unimpressive on an outing, or say something sharp, you like to hold my hand, but you're gone before the warmth can sink into my palm._

He stands, shutting the book without marking it. Rin is glaring at him, her eyes flashing and dry. He breathes, "I'll just try harder, then."

**.x.**

She leaves for a few days with the man. When she comes back, sunkissed and breathless and enamored, she doesn't even bother to tell Len about it, or even announce to him that she is home.

As if he'd want to know, anyways.

**.x.**

He walks with her after the funeral. The sun has insisted on being dull the entire morning, leaving them without shadows, an eerie appearance as they wind through headstones, the sky resting low.

(This one died after mere weeks, face crushed into an unrecognizable mass of blackened blood and matted cartilage, found just outside of town. It had been a bright day, the ground firm, dirt not displaced, screams unheard, weapon missing. Rin found out from town gossip when she was out with her friend.

The casket was shut. She probably could have recognized him by his body alone, anyways.)

Rin's arm is wound through his, her palm moving up and down the inside of his sleeve like it is soothing her. She wears a white tulip in her hair, tucked behind her ear exactly where he'd placed it. He's only now getting taller than her, so she can comfortably lean her head against his shoulder. He likes the weight of it, the feeling of her mouth moving before words come out. His arm is pressed between her breasts, but her corset is too thick to let her heart melt through…In the church, he'd touched her hair the way he'd done the night he'd slept next to her, and felt it fluttering under her skin, warm, taunting, writhing happily over a new kill.

As they walk, a man strolls past them. His eyes meet Rin's but he does not break stride, and Len's hand on her arm keeps her doing the same – when they part, though, her head swivels around, watching him leave.

Len sneers, almost accidentally, "Why don't you give up?"

She turns back, her hand pausing on the inside of his elbow. "Give up? On what?"

"Men. Love."

She laughs shakily. "Len, I am seventeen. This is not the time to relinquish myself to some lonely, pathetic life."

"What do you want from them?"

"Why do you care?"

"I can give it to you. Whatever it is."

"Brother, no. I assure you – you  _cannot_."

"What can be so different, between them and I? I love you, still, Rin. I love you when you're happy and angry and sad, unlike them, who run off when things are going bad – "

"They don't  _run_ , Len, they  _die_!" Her voice has broken, but it must be both from fury and bad memories. She covers her mouth with a hand, shaking her head. "You can't. Please, leave me alone about this."

"I can't leave you alone when you're upset."

She's still holding his arm. She whispers, "You're too good to me, brother. I just wish – I wish you would keep your mouth shut a little more."

He smiles crookedly, a slow warmth spreading to the corners of his mouth. She may be right. About just that one thing. He walks her back to the carriage, then sits across from her to watch her clean away her tears.

**.x.**

The third man and the third time, Rin stumbles aimlessly into his room, like she's lost her memory for what she searches.

He looks up at her from a book, again. She doesn't need to say anything.

He drawls sardonically, "Surprise, surprise," and neatly dodges when she, tear-ridden, throws his wine glass at his head. It shatters and bleeds down the wall, but she still cuddles next to him the entire night.

**.x.**

They sneak out to hunt a few days later. Traditionally, Rin isn't allowed to come, but she makes it very obvious that she doesn't care for her parents' rules, and even more plain that she's in an agitated mood and needs him to walk her through it.

They make a game of the journey, wrestling knives off of the others' belts, racing like children again. She catches him around the torso at some point, knocking her head against his back like a ram, his chest constricted as she clutches him tight during the gasps of his laughter. She presses near, even when it's beginning to hurt. Her breath fogs through his shirt.

She's the most alive when she's free of  _them_ , he thinks. He hasn't seen her like this for years, not since she began seeing others. They like to keep her small and coy and gentle, but he knows her for what she is – bigger than him, than whatever life her frailty and riches has strangled her into. She likes to laugh, to kick the stream’s water in arcs that surround her like a wingspan; she mocks birds and also mocks his seriousness, her legs stretching down the length of the branch she reclines on, the arch of her foot curving over sunlight, her tendons milk-white under her knee, skirt slipping, slipping. She runs the lace cuff of her sleeve over his ear while he sits on the branch beneath, staring into the tinted, wet dimness of the thicket; she has a crossbow between her legs, her knees mockingly tilted open, resting her elbows on her hips to stabilize. She's got faster eyes than him, and a quicker, vigorous bloodstream. She fires before he even sees that anything was there.

A deer collapses fantastically down an embankment, and Rin whoops.

"Well done," he says, just before she swings herself down from the tree and is racing through the brush, skirt clinging to stray branches. He trots after her, and can't help it – can't help but tug her sideways into him by the waist, their hips knocking, pressing his breathless grin into her hair. There is a preciousness in her excitement, but it leaves a strange taste in his mouth.

She jabs him in the ribs, getting him to jump off of her. "Ugh, I got it in the chest. You couldn't keep running, huh?" She slides on her rear down the small decline. He follows. The twins stand next to the struggling, massive body of the deer – a female, nostrils blowing wide and deceptively spindly legs kicking. The grass around them rustles, her pure senseless panic brewing a tiny storm. Her enormous eyes spin in the sockets, unable to understand the pretty blonde as her murderer.

"There isn't much majesty in this," Rin suddenly says.

He glances at her. Her energy has funneled away, leaving behind the empty girl that he is much more used to hearing. She unsheathes her knife, and moves to crouch near the head, away from the wildly kicking hooves. Len leans against the wall of dirt, folding his arms.

"No, none at all. How am I supposed to respect that? Am I supposed to think of her later?" Her eyes pleadingly on the beast, Rin gestures aimlessly with the knife. The light isn't strong enough to be caught by it – instead the metal appears to glow from her small, pale palm. He knows how soft they are, and how sharp the blade can be. "Am I always supposed to remember?"

Uncomfortable, he smirks. "What are you talking about, lunatic?"

"Wouldn't the world be a miserable place if all we did was remember what we've lost?" She barely suppresses her flinch as she wraps a hand around the deer's muzzle, pressing it with all the princess's strength into the dirt. "Where is that mourning supposed to end? There are – there are a million deer to replace her. It's all the same forest. All the same creature." She raises the knife, her movement steady and automaton. "All the same people to trade her away."

It’s showing itself – the part of her that glistens under other people’s hands. The evil part. No pretty smiles to protect it; no armour made of the girl that he loves.

Her face suddenly contorts, something crackling up her spine, and she plunges the knife down with an unfamiliar fury flaring off of her.

He inhales hard when she buries it to the hilt in the animal's neck, retracts it, the gesture cumbersome and sloppy in her hands – again she stabs, puncturing through the spasms of the chest, her knife deflecting off ribs, jogging her wrist in unnatural shocks. The handle slips in her soaking hands. Blood spatters up her skirt. He realises his own hands are shaking – he can feel the rapid heartbeat between her and the beast, a pathetic scream of finale like the reverberations of a church bell. Hair fisted in his hands. A metal weight, straining all the way up his arm, and crushing downwards, crumpling a skull, a stranger's breath huffing its final useless discord against his palm.

Len yanks the knife from her.

"Stop, Rin!"

She collapses backwards off her knees, landing against his chest. He tosses the blade away. He takes her hands, the skin hot and slippery with blood, and presses them to her chest, leaning into her, his face buried in the nape of her neck. She’s her beautiful, concealing self again, but he can feel it. Sickening and enlightening: her pulse, throttling forwards the deranged heart. More than he has ever known, it is struggling.

He whispers, "Calm down. Rin, please, breathe."

She obeys. In, out, he measures her lungs pressing against both their arms, while trying to calm his own. He hasn't felt this way before. Everything is shaking around the edges, watery. He crushes his eyes shut. The air stinks of blood and reeks with panic. His lips are dotted with her sweat. What was she talking about?

She manages a shallow, "I'm sorry, I just – lost myself – "

"No, I know. It's okay. Rin."

"There's so much going on – "

"I know – "

"Why has it – "

"It has done nothing to you. You're safe."

"Hasn't it, though? Hasn't everything hurt me?" Her hands release from fists in his. She's staring at the mangled body, he knows, but her pulse has slowed. Heavy thrumming again, crawling along, fingernails pulling her through the dirt. She asks, "Why else do they deserve what I do to them?"

She jerks herself from his arms. Her next words come as a whisper, untouched, frigid. They hang in the air like fog. She looks directly at him. Infinite blue.

"What has cursed me, Len?"

He smears the blood from her face with the back of his hand. "You're just the wrong girl to love."

**.x.**

“Len,” she asks, tracing her fingers along the line of his collar, “aren’t you lonely?”

At nineteen, he glances down at her; he can only see the golden crown of her head. She’s pressed tightly next to him amongst the sofa cushions. They’ve piled the pillows from the furniture all around them, concealing them like children again, but it must have been her melancholy for such careless juvenile days that has drawn her close to his side again.

“Why would I be?” He kisses the top of her head. “I have you right here.”

“Not now…Just, in general. You don’t go to see your friends anymore. And mother and father don’t shove suitors on you like with _me_ , so you just – you’ve never been with anyone, have you?”

He snorts. His hand rests near her lower back, so he pokes her there hard enough to make her jolt with a giggle. “That’s a bit of an inappropriate question.”

“Oh, hush. I don’t mean _been with_ like that.” She arches her head up and grips his chin, wrinkling her nose cutely as she rubs it against his. It makes him feel warm to the tips of his fingers. “Don’t be lewd. I only mean courting.”

“You like to speak of love,” he says. “A quintessential prince’s damsel, aren’t you?”

“Don’t tease. I think love is _beautiful_ ,” she insists, giving his chin a hard pinch. “You know, being so irrevocably dedicated and admiring and supportive of someone…Don’t you think?”

He can’t see how it’s beautiful. All it’s done to him is torture him – all it’s done to her men is drown them in her poison – all it’s done to her is drift her away from him, because her love is given to all the wrong people, like the gusts from Aeolus that wrench her away from her safest path. If she’s the siren when men are in her claws, then he’s swimming after her regardless of those winds, her song no longer in his ears but in his bones. In his soul.

He lies just to see her smile, “It’s beautiful when _you’re_ in love, sister.”

And she does smile. Rin taps his cheek affectionately, and nuzzles back into his shoulder. She just wanted to be flattered. Does she want to hear more? He can tell her she’s beautiful in endless ways. He can show her.

Unconsciously, he spreads his fingers against her lower back. A rigidity casts over her like a breeze rippling through the grass; he ventures carefully up her hip. It feels a bit like his. She’s warm like she’s been under the sun. Her heartbeat picks up. It smells his secret from his touch and is looking to hunt, tear, kill –

“Len.”

He snaps out of it and stills his hand.

She giggles cagily, and reaches behind her to pull his hand away. “Len, don’t.”

A beat passes. The burn seems to settle deeper with time because she’s suddenly sitting up and moving away. “ _Don’t_ touch me like that.”

He swallows. She fit perfectly in his palm, the curve of bone under her skin like a seashell, pearled by the waves. He says, “I’m sorry; I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Like hell,” she whispers, and stands from the sofa. Before she leaves he can see she’s blushing.

**.x.**

Len, now twenty, is begrudgingly boarding a carriage, trying his best to be polite to the staff but absolutely spitting inside. His parents are sending him away for three months, something about breathing room, something about  _excuses_. He knows they're growing wary of him, and he doesn't get  _why_. He's nothing but respectful to them. A perfect son.  _You don't smile anymore, Len_. Rin is worse in her demeanor than he is, but he'd never wish his own fate upon her. Ever.

Suddenly, she is running across the yard, her hair undone and whipping like ribbon behind her, pieces of her dress missing. She must have not wanted to miss him leaving. This makes him flush with a sort of gratefulness that he's become used to feeling around her – her existence makes him blessed – so the intensity of it almost breaks into his reticence. Her arms wave in the air as she calls his name.

"Don't! Don't leave yet!"

"Of course not, sister!" He leans out the door, holding onto the frame with a hand. "I won't leave you running after me like a fool!"

" _You_ try this and tell me you don’t look a fool, too – " She doesn't have time to finish her reasoning before she stumbles next to the cart. From the grass, her attempt to hug him is uncomfortable, so he slides off the steps next to her. Brings her close, unable to help grinning – she's been so  _good_  lately, so happy, her parents leaving her alone about finding suitors. She kisses both his cheeks, then holds his face, pouting cherubically at him.

She chides, "Have a safe trip. Don't forget about me."

"I won't. Even with all the pretty foreign girls."

She laughs, running a hand through his bangs, pushing them back the way she would rather them. "I'll write you every day, okay?"

"How boring. I don't want to read from my dull little sister."

She smacks him lightly on the side of the head, giggling. Her face softens, though, and she brings him pause by guiding down his chin and kissing the top of his head. "I'll miss you."

"I'll miss you, too."

"I love you."

"Right."

The ride out is long and lonely. He wonders why it makes him so uncomfortable when she tells him she loves him.

**.x.**

As it turns out, the man from the graveyard had been there to visit his young, sickness-slaughtered daughter. He was a lord from somewhere over the river, and far too old for Rin, but also very charming, flattering, and insistent.

She says this all so happily in her writings. He wants to set the man aflame. He suffices with the letter instead, thrown into the fireplace.

_Congratulations, sister._

Once again. Won them all. Does she want  _everything_? Snatch them all up in her trap, an impatient, gluttonous, insidious spider. What is she? More than a whore, more than desperate. She's empty. Hollow. He's lived beside her so long, he can hear her ring when she steps. Nothing else inside, so she needs other people to pretend they can lift her heart, one soaking in all her pity and misery, a contemptible drum inside her husk, hanging under her lying, venomous-fanged head like the pendulum in a clock.

If her heart is too large, then he has none at all.

Nothing.

She must have taken it from him.

He breathes into his hands, alone, the fire pouring against the bareness of his spine. He can't help but think of her, (always), how there is something that she thinks he can't give her (always always always) – she must be as blind as she is vacant. He'll do  _anything_. Anything. He's always been willing to. She means everything to him. What is it, that they have that he doesn't?

Ah, it's obvious.

How embarrassing.

His grin splits, teeth cold against his palms. He isn't  _that man_. That isn't  _his job_. As siblings, twins, her job isn't to be pretty and be kind and be quiet, and his isn't to fuck her. How nice. He doesn't care. He wants  _her_  loud and uncontrollable and her sweet, wild, beautiful self, and he wants  _himself_  inside her.

He loves her more than they do. Isn't that the point? He doesn't aim to claim her, twist her inside out, but he wants to make her understand. He can lose ages on the enamoring disarm of her smile. On the curve linking her ribs to her hip, the cup of shadow between the hooks of her collarbone, the dart of her small tongue against the sparrow slope in her top lip. He has the same mouth as she does. The same teeth biting into the heel of his hand, heat running down into his wrist. Skating his own fingers along the navy veins pouring in his inner elbow, imagining that she's so much the same. His hips may be narrower, but he's seen through her nightgown how they jut in the same way, curve brokenly in the light when twisting a leg up in a step, or in balance against a mattress. Her hands, his thighs; her grip, his hair; their arching curves in their spines. Their violence in release, and  _her name._

Catching his own eye in the mirror while he does this is lethal, because that is what is so different between the two of them. His eyes are cold. Dead. He's left in the middle of nothing, knowing he'll never have this for real.

She's been spinning around his head for years, leaving room for no one else, sometimes not even leaving room for himself. He's so near to death anyways, and she's inching him closer, closer with every moment she spends against him. And he doesn't even mind that. Dying. If he can't have her, then…

He's so sick of imagining.

He's so sick of others stealing her.

He's… _sick_.


	2. red

The last letter she sent was so happy. So  _happy_ , because the man had asked for her hand in marriage, but things are so complicated, of  _course_ , him of lower rank, it's hard for these things to work out, and his nephew has been flirting  _so_  much with her too, but it makes her  _so_  happy that he had the heart and gall to ask. Their parents aren't pleased, but it isn't like she cares. He's like no other.

(Is his nephew like no other, too?)

Len doesn't immediately come home once the three months are up. He's let this relationship go on so long, out of his control. He doesn't like  _not knowing_. It's so much easier when he can keep an eye on her (men) from a close distance. She is so unsafe without his protective gaze.

It doesn't take much to find him. Len introduces himself kindly at the door as Rin's brother, and a flustered façade takes over the face of this monster. They trade staunch greetings. Len tries not to blow up about what this stranger has been doing to his twin, but it's difficult. He's twitchy. He aimlessly slides a knife out of the block in the kitchen and drives it into the counter, smiling pleasantly, the other man's face a charred mask. Who cares if he's frightened? Apologetic? It's all lies, now. He's done his damage to the princess. He's wormed his way into the garden. Fucker. The prince's hands stab the knife deeper into the wood.

He can't believe he's let this man get so close. To trapping her. Taking her. Breaking off her wings. Making her ignorant to who she is and to her brother. She does seem blinded by the light of her own lovesick smile, as if underneath it, he's burned away and gone. When she is happy, she is  _one_ , instead of her brother's, and he is not hers.

It doesn't work that way.

He can't be alone.

"What do you feel for her?"

Useless. Spineless. His answer doesn't matter, because men will always want to force their feelings into her. Hate, apathy, or love. She's just their canvas for spoiling.

"Do you think you can feel more than I do?" In a way more pure? God doesn't want him to feel this way, and he still insists he does – what's stronger, than that?

Splinters crack out of the puncture point as Len twists the blade. It's  _blunt_. This man is so beneath Rin. Shouldn't he begging by now? The other men had –

Len just manages to sidestep a swipe at his wrist. Something unnatural uncoils on Len's face, and he's pretty sure he's smirking. His grip tightens on the handle. He cannot read anything in the others' face, but it's starting to reek like the deer again. Things have gotten so much clearer for him lately.

Her fiancé, was he?

Won't she be miserable soon.

**.x.**

He just wants to help her  _understand_.

Blood is soaking down his shirt. He will have to throw it out again. He's been doing this for four years and hasn't gotten any better at not making such a mess of things; the only thing that ever changes is that it always feels like a more comfortable fit under in his skin.

Will this help her see?

She is toxic to all but  _him_.

He can hold her hand and not burn, kiss her and not perish. Kiss her. Kiss her. He wants to. He has always wanted to. She is what rings inside of him. Nothing else. No joy. No triumph. He rips the blade out the other side of this one's throat, though he's long gone unconscious. Blood sprays with the effort. Too  _much_. Up his wrists. She'll find this one on her own, because he's lying in her bed. Maybe then she will learn: the devil crawls out of her own body.

How are two empty people supposed to fill each other?

He'll be happier underground than being without her.

Happier dead.

**.x.**

Something is wrong.

Ever since he'd returned, she's been unwilling to speak with him. A broken heart has left her shocked. She locks her door and does not answer, does not eat, and he finds her in her slip in the bathroom sliding glass across her lips and she tells him, "You never wrote me back."

"I know."

"You must not have even read them."

"I did, Rin."

"You said you would try harder to make me happy, remember? Why hasn't it worked?" She jerks her hand back in surprise as a bead of blood rushes to the tiny cut under her mouth. He realises she'd dropped a glass somewhere on her way from the door to the tub. Where are her maids? He tries to step into the room but she aimlessly swipes an arm in his direction, not looking at him.

"I don't know you, Len. You've been so distant from me."

He inches his way across the floor. The liquid she'd been drinking smells acrid, but he can't quite place what it is. While she isn't looking, he crouches a few feet away, and carefully begins gathering the glass into his palm.

"I tried. When you left… I  _said_   _it_." She digs a handful of shards into her palm. "What can I do to make you stop wanting it?"

He doesn't answer. She must be drunk, so she isn't going to listen. He cleans up the glass and tells the handmaids to forbid her from running a bath, even when they fret over the perfect drip of blood down her chin, and the sorry bloom of red in her palms. "Don't let her wash it off," he says. "She has to see what she's capable of."

**.x.**

Why does she love such weak men? Why does she love so many?

If she would put all her love in one thing – well, supposedly, the chances of losing are lower. But she isn't a gambler. She's just a cheat.

He slips into the church. The service is long over, but she is curled up in the pews amongst the dissipated shadows of the others who had held love for him, or hatred, or a grudge. He touches her shoulder. For all the men she goes through, she must have a memory only for the touch of one – her brother. But this time she does not react, and he has to bring her into his arms himself.

Small. Her sounds are small. Her back shudders, his fingers pouring up and down her dress, trying to sense a spine at all. Minute, fizzling nerves. Give her feeling again – if he could give her this, something that isn't misery, false hope... He presses his mouth into her hair, touching her back. Her small fists ball up at his ribs, clenching and releasing like an exhale. Only hearing her like this can bring him to normalcy, now, as if he walks in a void until she is with him, and then he can breathe again.

She eases back. He notices the abnormal sheen to her eyes, a hardness becoming them that she doesn't often use in such a mood. She squeezes his hand, and whispers, her tone washed away, "It's always a murder, Len… Do you hear what they say about me?"

He shakes his head, less of an answer and more a way to quiet her. She grits her teeth.

"I didn't  _do_  anything, Len, believe me." She pushes their hands into his chest, a gentle punch, as she uncurls herself taller on the pew. "I haven't hurt  _anyone_!"

His stomach twists. The smell of blood fills his head again, brassy and thick He murmurs, "I know, I trust you..."

Her voice rises. "I would never hurt anyone! I never want this to happen, not the way it does…"

"…Yet they still come to you."

"I still  _lure_  them!" She doesn't flinch under his venom, but instead sits taller. Spine of iron. To her new resolution, he is uncomfortable in the way of a stranger, and proud in the way of a brother. She bites her lip, but is still becoming louder, harried. "What if they all fear me? What will I have?"

"Me. You'll always have me."

"Oh, of course," she seethes, "but what will happen to you?"

"Nothing. Nothing. I'll be with you forever."

Something dawns on her face. She yanks her hands into her own lap. Whatever was there and violent in her bleeds away, leaving behind the husk of her voice which can barely hold the realization: " _You're_  all I'm going to have left." She inches back. "I can't do that. I can't."

"I'm not enough?"

Whatever it was flicks back on. Like fire ripping up her body, hissing underneath her milk-white skin, spreading the quietest blush along her cheeks. Her collar bleaches, fists tautening in her lap. He isn't sure what he's feeling. Her tone makes him want to protect himself.

She snaps, "You're… _doing_  it again. You make me feel terrible, Len. Don't you notice that you do this? Make me feel cruel for not loving you as much as you love me? What do you want me to do? Do you want me –" her face contorts, disgusted, "to  _give_  myself to you? What is it? What will be a good enough answer for you?"

"Do you not want me?"

"I don't want  _only_  you." Her eyes fix, sharp, on his. "You're right. You aren't enough."

He is lightheaded. "But, for me,  _you_  are."

"I'm so sorry, brother."

He knows the sensation, now. It's the way he feels when he wakes up, blood on his hands, sweat in his eyes, curled up next to a body as if enjoying a nap in the sun. Like everything under him is gone. The floor, the earth, space, his own legs. When he really does feel as empty as he is.

His hand closes on her arm and pulls her into him. Her jaw is squared, her lips slightly open over grit teeth. He doesn't want to hurt her. She's not drunk or sick this time. He softens his grip. She can run. She may run. If she's lucky enough to find the ground.

(If not  _hers_ , then what is he?)

Earnestly, he presses, "I never wanted you to be  _upset_."

"You're smart, Len. You knew what you were doing the whole time."

She is looking down at him. Her gaze is like the step off the chair, rope around his neck. Her cheeks still glimmer with tears. Isn't she…so tired of crying? Why can't she let herself make it easy? Why can't she just stop falling in love, and return to what love is already built inside of her?

She hisses, "Do it, then. Get it over with."

She braces her hands on the backs of the pews. Lifts herself up a little, staring hard at him – didn't she, just a moment ago, fear they would all call her a murderer, as if she was honestly kind, as if she was pure? Now she's her old self, daring, rigid, edges that slit open fingers and tongues. Maybe finding the slashed body of her fiancé in her bed has changed her a little bit. His fingers stray to the inside of her elbows. Sleeved. Something nags that maybe, after this, he'll get to find out, do their veins make maps to each other?

She doesn't flinch when he kisses the corner of her mouth. Even her hands don't tense up.

When he inches back, she's staring at a place beyond his ear. He cards his fingers in her hair, gently running his thumb to the corner of her eye, but she does not react. So he closes his own eyes, quieting the church, feeling her in a way unfrightening.

She sticks with salt and tears to his lips, and she tastes like it, crystalline, ringing through his teeth. Something invisible in his ribs feebly flaps its wings, and he pulls her in deeper, melting into her, she's sweet in the way he always imagined – as if there is room to argue, he carefully coaxes her mouth open, slanting his against hers, and she follows, apathetic and slow, her eyes always searing, but her body betraying. She tastes like blood and a syrupy warmth. Unconsciously, he brings all of her closer in a search for warmth, pulling her skirt tight along her thighs, into his lap, her above him (she always is  _more_  than him), and she just keeps glaring somewhere far off from the nightmare.

And he can hear her heart…that weight, the anvil, the killer. Throbbing in her throat, armed to fill him, to drag down everyone who dares caress it. He's never wanted anything else but to drown.

She presses her hands against his chest and pushes him off.

So he moves away. As he should.

She doesn't look at him. The lace of her sleeve brushes against her mouth, in a way perfunctory. Her tears are cleared. It's the first time, he thinks aimlessly, that her eyes look a little like his own.

He feels…strange.

Empty in satisfaction, but a tug of regret, looking over his shoulder, a conversation gone wrong. Why didn't it feel like all it should have? Inevitably, he expected himself to be angry. Aggressive. Pin her to him, have her the way he's suffered through a thousand times.

But he just feels himself crumble. He is dropping forwards, crushing the palms of his hands into his eyes, aching in the nothingness stewing within him; he can feel the tug backwards of the rope on his neck, and heat tears from his throat to his mouth, sparking behind his eyelids.

He whispers, fractured, "I just wanted you to feel loved."

"I always felt that, Len." She carefully gets to her feet, and looks down at her brother, rocking pathetically on the pew. "Love just dies when I try to give it back."

**.x.**

She makes plain that she doesn't wish to see him again. Her parents chalk it up to her depression, and Len refuses to give it a name at all. She may continue to fall in love with shadows, but he doesn't want to be around to know about it.

(She deserves something precious of him, though it will ruin him to give it.)

He lays a white tulip gently at her closed door. An unlit torch. Without the danger of thorns, unlike the deadly passion of roses – representing of an unconditional love.

After it all, she's different than him. And she is also right.

She has never hurt anyone.

Not by her own will.

**.x.**

Shaking his shoulder, she pulls him out of a nightmare about the deer again.

"Len," she whispers, and the intimacy of her voice in the dark sends quakes across his skin. She lets go – the track of her fingers dragging in the silk of his shirt leaves behind a delicate burn. He touches the space in her absence. His own hands are icy.

She says, "Please, come with me."

He squints open his eyes. He cannot see her face, but she has lit a travelling lantern next to his bed and it flickers crumbling haloes in her hair. The blonde is pouring down her back and dripping over her shoulders onto his bed. However, he does decipher the pockmark of shadow in her dimples when she smiles at him. He gets out of bed.

She modestly turns away when he changes, but he's staring at her the entire time. It's been...a  _week_ , now, that he's last seen her. He isn't even sure if she's always been in the castle. It must be difficult to burn away the stamp of his kiss, he figures, when it's always been inked inside her, from the moment they were brought to life together. He's missed her so terribly. Even her anger is something precious to him.

But now…she seems so demure.

They sneak out of the palace without obstacle. She's apparently assured that their parents are asleep, and has cleared away the guards. But that they need privacy, to  _talk_. He's too smart to ask what about. He's too obsessed with every second. The sun has just barely risen when they enter the courtyard, Rin holding the lantern with a prowler's comfort, and him with a rotting feeling drizzling in his skull.

Once they pass into the dull emerald forest, she utters the first words. "I remember, when we were kids – " Rin stops beside him, tilting her head back to finger apart the canopy of black leaves a hundred miles above their heads. "We played here often. Getting lost. Making a new world, until we could recognise it better than the real one."

Len hums. "We once spent a whole night out here, undetected."

"Well," Rin smiles shakily, her skin glowing in the oily dim, "they did search.  _Frantically_. I remember waking to the rage of the hunting dogs…not to mention the anger of our  _parents_."

Len keeps an eye on the jump of the dark from her lamp; when Rin approaches, she appears before her shadow. She adds, "I didn't understand their panic. Why did they always need us, every minute? What was the value in being sure of where we were, when they hardly paid attention to us when we were right under their noses?"

"I suppose you understand now?"

She says nothing for a beat. Then, "…No. I only know with more certainty that there is precious value in disappearing."

"And in letting people disappear."

"Yes."

He smiles. Since when has she gleaned such an aura of mystery, much like his own? The part of his head that is painful wants to hold her hand in this dark, relive that falling off the end of the earth with her, her clinging to his arm, nestling her blonde locks into his shoulder. The way he could feel her mouth as it smiled. But she is holding so tightly to the lantern. She is holding so tightly to herself.

"What do you suppose, now?" he asks. He turns to her. Haloes in her hair. She's never been anything further than an angel. "Will they search for us again?"

 _"I_  will." Rin lifts the lantern to her face. She stares into it, a certain blankness casting like gauze over her features; the angelic gold is melting garishly across her cheeks. "I've been searching for you for ages, now, Len."

She blows out the light.

It is not pitch dark, but the shift is shocking. He wants to intrude – he's here, he's always been  _right here_  – but she is putting down the lantern while the other hand clumsily, childishly, claws up his arm for purchase in his vest. He's too caught up in the headache and her closeness to be confused. She presses tight to him. And he hears it.

Her heart. Ringing hard and racing through her chest, a desperation behind her ribs, but instead of relief his mind whirls to the stun of waking up on unfamiliar floors with familiar deaths. They had echoed with  _that sound_  even when they were corpses. They – those who  _ruined_  her – had more than he did. She had not held them close and heard nothing when she wanted to hear the world. Was he expected to give her the world, then? He didn't have it. He had nothing. He's empty, without her (empty  _with_  her). He would have to make it, make a life for her, with his hands so bloody, his only talent in destruction.

Would she want it?

Somewhere in the midst of it, he's wrenched her into a kiss again. Something more than violence behind it, but the morbid opposite. He can't make anything of her. (She whispers something that is torn to pieces between them.) She is that killer. She's the demon behind the worst of him – the bodies that he doesn't remember mangling, slick with blood, some of it his own, falling apart in places like badly-made clothing. Seams pulling, popping as he tries to find somewhere to display them. To make her understand. (His tongue against her teeth, he's waiting for fangs.) Sometimes that part had remained a blur, too, but more often, he recalled with perfect clarity the feeling of waking up next to pouring eye sockets scaring him out of a nightmare. It's better now, he thinks. Now that he recalls every second. He wants her to remember, too.

Something cold presses into his throat.

She shoves it in deep, pushing him backwards.

Her eyes are hard, and blue, and  _hers_  again from over the muzzle of a gun.

She hisses, "You're my curse, aren't you?"

At first, he realises, he isn't afraid. Not by this. Not the way the metal wafts the reek of polish, or the way she's watching him, his saliva trailing off her mouth. And not by the truth…it brings him the patience of relief, in a deceptive gust of euphoria and panic. Like the rope she'd tied the first time they'd kissed has been perfectly complimented with her kicking out the chair. Good. She's a bit blurry, his perceptions askew, breath coming raggedly.  _Good_. He's had enough of convincing her of things. He always has wondered what she's really thought of him. Silence pours between them like silver, the next direction warped in it as much as their images are to each other, because, he realises, he isn't really sure that he knows what she thinks at all.

She jerks up the gun. "Aren't you?!"

And he breathes, "Yes."

A fracture overcomes the rage in her expression. A single, infuriated sob shakes through her frame, rattling in him, too. Strange, he thinks, for her to be pulling a gun on him, but for the truth to hurt her so much.

"They told me. Somehow it wasn't hard to believe."

He waits, and she explains. "You were seen. Taking the – the body to the palace."

Ah. He doesn't recall that part very well… only the arranging of him in her bed, knowing that his pathetic sister spent all her time now in the study where he once called her a whore and she once wrote poetry with lipstick on the envelopes. She left blood on the carpet, painting up the wall with her own viscera. Empty girl. He idly licks his lips, where his mouth has gone dry.

"I was told by his nephew. You must remember him."

"Yes." Len's mouth pulls up, uncoordinated, in a tipsy grin. Suddenly he feels a torrent rising, and it's better that it be words than the laugh he's wary of skirting down the oily shine of the gun. "He must have loved you. All men do, don't they, Rin? You lure them, you once said. You're their siren. Charming them with a beautiful song, but you close your eyes…" He slowly raises a hand, and drags a knuckle under the muzzle, "while they are slaughtered."

She flicks him off by knocking the gun hard into the underside of his chin. Her voice is shaking, he notes, in the way of a grip too tight. "No, I didn't. I wasn't – It was always  _you_."

He sneers. "But  _you_ , sister, were the reason they died. The wrong girl to love…for  _them_  to love."

"And I suppose you could love me freely?"

"No." A short laugh burns its way out. "You have never made it easy. It doesn't work the way I wanted. I can't use their deaths to send you running to me. Only… to break you a little bit. Make you a little smaller, so no one else can take you. Though, even, even if you're tiny and brittle, I  _still_  can't have you."

"You want something  _ruined_."

"No, I just want you."

He watches, pleasantly transfixed, as she shudders a finger tighter around the half-moon of a trigger. The minute tick reflects in her face, where she flinches, but her hands, he notices, become so steady. A breath warms its way through her, and her gaze closes, crystal. Impenetrable.

"I stopped knowing you a long time ago, brother," she says, her voice tepid. "I'm here, and I don't – I don't feel as if I'm facing something real. Just a shadow who's always been feeding off of me. You wanted me to be happy, so you could drain me of all of it. Didn't you?  _Why_?"

She suddenly shoves forwards, knocking him back a step, momentarily choking him on the metal in its (perfect) fit under his throat. She is entirely solidity. She is entirely aflame.

"Did I ever ease your soul, brother? Were my flickers of appreciation worth it? Were the kisses, was the  _love_ , or the times you got the gift of seeing me cry? Because this is the end of us. I've lost all I could have had for you. You've made the cut too deep. I've bled – I've bled  _everywhere_ , and this is where you're going to drown."

"I'm not afraid of it."

She twists the muzzle.

"Do it, then." The grin splits his face 'til it hurts. Finally. Finally, he realises.

Finally she's seeing.

It's never been easy. Watching her turn away.

What is he, if not hers? Can he be anything, if his reflection in her – his twin, his blood – is shattered, and he has fit nothing under his skin but ways to hurt her.

"All I'm living for is something I can never have. If you're so pained by having me, then maybe losing me will be the suture."

He takes her by the back of the neck, and for all her fierceness, she stumbles into him, the gun turning and securing under his jaw. In a meditative single movement, she unlocks the safety. The sound shimmers through his head, a bell again, something heavenly.

He says, "There's one man left who loves you."

Her head lifts slightly from her aim, pressed close to him, and he knows that look – one that he's seen a thousand times at the funerals. A sinful mix of greed and apathy. One where she is armed to clip her heart onto his ankles, and watch him go under. He can feel the pressure of water over him, salt burning his nose and eyes. She's speaking to him from above the surface, and he's deaf to it, because sinking, sinking means he is filled with something.

She pulls the trigger back.

Briefly, he wonders, how hard her heart must beat.

**.**

**.x.**

**.**

She is a woman surrounded by death.

Those who have not seen the bodies whisper about how she must be cursed. A devil lying dormant in the princess's shining body, but sinking in its teeth when men fall prey to her glittering smile. If they don't think that she, herself, is the killer, then they think it must be some spell, some malign deity clinging to her hip and peeling apart her heart bit by bit.

At her brother's funeral, she waits behind. Her family, the respected, all file away. A glistening black coffin poises at the front of the church, looking so small and forgettable underneath the cavernous brass of the organs, the stained-glass window pouring a rainbow of dusted light unto the floor.

She stands and makes her way to it, holding a single tulip to her chest.

She rests it against the glossed wood. It isn't white, like he gave her so often. The petals stain red, vibrant and graceful. So similar to a rose, but its shredded stem is smooth.

Unconditional love, beginning to rot.


End file.
